Can't you make it $X for the product + 1 year of updates?
I understand that you need sustainability but you can seek for that on enterprise support deals and by convincing users to renew their license after a year to get a newer version.
I find this both smart and nice: you can pay monthly and still get a permanent license so you won't be trapped.
Full disclosure: I use Netbeans which is free from the start and which I like better anyway, I'm just saying Jetbrains seems to be a nice company ;-)
We know the climbing Everest reality of building software for money. It's an incredible amount of work and a long shot to keep going for any length of time.
Subscription is really necessary to keep great releases new releases coming steadily and to deliver quality support.
I can see the reasoning of making the license permanent without future support and updates, but I still don't begrudge anyone for not doing that.
I'm a developer and not out to try and push the rest of the industry down to the 99 cent app store model.
Ideally though? I would really like to have a one-time purchase option. I buy this for myself, though I work in a company, because this is a tool I particularly find useful. In a year it's going to just stop working, and I won't remember why, because I won't remember paying a license for it. Then I'll have to look up the email and do all the nonsense to figure out what my login is and buy it again. And that just sucks. I've dropped a lot of services because I just don't need them enough for that. But I'm hoping this works into my flow well enough.
One thing to note - since the db engine is running in the same process as Excel it can interact with it. There are some nice things it can do because of this, for instance, SQL-based conditional formatting (e.g. there's a SetFontColor function), calling VBA functions from SQL and a bunch more.
There are also some other quite cool functions, e.g. replacex and regex_split, levdist, eval and others. The QuickQueries dialog has some built-in queries to check out if you're interested in what these can do.
As for permanent licenses, I understand the concern. If I do end up going offering permanent licenses for professional licenses, I'll either upgrade the existing licenses or offer a paid upgrade to the permanent license to cover any price difference.
Yeah, the amount of intellectual violence I'll be able to perpetrate against my data is just staggering. Regex in Excel has always be a bit of a slog, but to do it in SQL in Excel? Gosh. That's almost worth the price of adminssion right there.
(Ever try to conditionally refactor a screwy OPC itempath based on an arbitrary spec and bad naming conventions in a cobbled together dump from an overworked customer engineer? Swiss army chainsaws are the only elegant solution there.)
I love regex myself, I feel like a ninja using them:) The replacex function was one of the first ones I implemented. Regex_split is the latest one and I love it (the single post on the QueryStorm blog is about that one).
If you're .NET-savvy, check out the "eval" function, you can implement a function as a C#-like lambda expression.
I did a poor job explaining what the plugin can do, QuickQueries is a step in that direction, but I only prepared a few. Plus they need short videos or at least blog posts to go along with them.
Until this pricing model is changed, I will have to pass or wait for an alternative.
It's a shame too, because this seems like a great product.